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Poet
Henry Vaughan
B. 1621 D. 1695
Henry Vaughan was born in 1621 in the Welsh country parish of Llansantffread between the Brecon Beacons and the Black Mountains, where he lived for nearly the whole of his life. His younger twin brother, Thomas, became a reputed alchemist….
Poet
Anthony Howell
B. 1945
Anthony Howell is a poet, novelist and performance artist, whose first collection of poems, Inside the Castle, was published in 1969. He has since published 17 volumes of poetry (among them translations and a Selected Poems). His most recent collection…
Poet
Lewis Carroll
B. 1832 D. 1898
Lewis Carroll was the literary pseudonym of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, born in 1832, the third in a family of eleven children; he had seven younger sisters. In childhood, he produced magazines for his sisters which display his love of parody,…
Poet
C. H. Sisson
B. 1914 D. 2003
C. H. Sisson died in 2003 at the age of 89. He was known as a critic, political theorist, poet, novelist, and translator. He was a great friend of the critic and writer Donald Davie, with whom he corresponded regularly….
Poet
Luke Wright
B. 1982
Luke Wright (b. 1982) was spurred into poetry when he first saw John Cooper Clarke perform at the Colchester Arts Centre in 1998, which, he said, ‘changed everything’. Since then Wright has become one of the most celebrated live poets…
Poet
Melissa Lee-Houghton
B. 1982
Fearless, naked and knowing, Melissa Lee-Houghton’s poems square up to the wildest reaches of our emotional lives. Hers is a poetry of excess, of the beautiful mess and complex depths of life as it is variously lived. While it is…
Poet
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers
B. 1966
Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, born at Hillbrow in Johannesburg, is an award-winning South African writer and performance artist. The daughter of an Australian mother and a Ghanaian father, she was given up for adoption at nine months of age, although…
Poet
Neil Rollinson
B. 1960
Neil Rollinson’s poetry has been noted for its eroticism, and certainly the earlier collections are dominated by sensual encounters of various kinds. His subject matter also takes in science and sports which has led one reviewer to describe him as…
Poet
Geoffrey Lehmann
B. 1940
Geoffrey Lehmann was born in Sydney in 1940, his childhood was spent at McMahon’s Point on Sydney Harbour. Educated at Anglican schools, Lehmann went on to study arts and law, graduating from the University of Sydney in 1960 and 1963…
Poet
Gerard Benson
B. 1931 D. 2014
How delightful to know Mr Benson Everyone wants to know him So witty and charming and handsome (Though some think he’s ugly and dim). Delightful indeed, and of course the homage to Edward Lear is unsurprising for this prodigiously gifted…
Poet
Kelwyn Sole
B. 1951
Kelwyn Sole is a South African poet, born in Johannesburg in 1951. After studying English at the University of Witwatersrand, and taking an MA from the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, he began a career teaching…
Poet
Lorraine Mariner
B. 1974
Lorraine Mariner grew up in Upminster and attended Huddersfield University, where she read English, and University College London, where she read Library and Information Studies. She lives in London and works as an Assistant Librarian at the Poetry Library, Southbank…
Poet
Jane Yeh
B. 1971
Jane Yeh is an American poet who has lived in England for over a decade. Born in New Jersey, she was educated at Harvard University, the University of Iowa—where she took an MFA at the prestigious writers’ program—and at Manchester…
Poet
G. K. Chesterton
B. 1874 D. 1936
Chesterton is probably best known for his popular priest-detective Father Brown, who appeared in over fifty short stories. However, he was also a poet, biographer, essayist, dramatist, critic, journalist, advocate of a political movement called ‘Distributism’ and, after his conversion…
Poet
Christopher Reid
B. 1949
Often associated with the short-lived Martian school of the 1980s, Christopher Reid’s poetry has come a long way since the extra-terrestrial metaphors and puzzling imagery that were the hallmark of his early writing. His gift for unusual, typically comic description…
Poet
William Cowper
B. 1731 D. 1800
William Cowper was a popular poet and writer of hymns. His descriptions of everyday life in the English countryside changed nature writing in the eighteenth century, in many ways preparing the ground for poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge. Cowper…
Poet
Robert Burns
B. 1759 D. 1796
Burns started life as a ploughman in Scotland but is now one of the world’s most celebrated poets. Every January, his life is remembered with whisky, haggis, singing and dancing on Burns Night. Perhaps as a distraction from the hard…
Poet
Thomas Love Peacock
B. 1785 D. 1866
Thomas Love Peacock is probably best known today for his hilarious Nightmare Abbey, which cheerfully satirizes the interest of contemporary literature in morbid subjects and gothic settings. Some of the targets of his broadly affectionate satire were significant literary figures…